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Marston Meadows: With the poem that inspired Ian McEwan's new novel What We Can Know
A walk is like a knot that gets undone,
And yet it keeps us closer.
In Marston Meadows, John Fuller celebrates the rewards of a life lived in rich attentiveness to the world. The book opens with the extraordinary title sequence, a corona of fifteen intertwining sonnets written for the poet’s wife on their diamond wedding anniversary. At once magisterial and delicate, they build into a moving meditation on how our selves are shaped, and deepened, by long companionship, under the growing shadow of mortality.
Taking in a dizzying sweep of human time, Fuller reflects on what keeps us together and what breaks us apart. With spectacular formal dexterity and a tender awe, the poems track the hidden lives of wildflowers, birds, and other emissaries from an increasingly fragile natural world. Lyrical, irreverent, freighted with a lifetime’s understanding, the poems reach out, with the humility of an apprentice, to the precious others who share our ‘Can you tell / Me / Something of love?’
And yet it keeps us closer.
In Marston Meadows, John Fuller celebrates the rewards of a life lived in rich attentiveness to the world. The book opens with the extraordinary title sequence, a corona of fifteen intertwining sonnets written for the poet’s wife on their diamond wedding anniversary. At once magisterial and delicate, they build into a moving meditation on how our selves are shaped, and deepened, by long companionship, under the growing shadow of mortality.
Taking in a dizzying sweep of human time, Fuller reflects on what keeps us together and what breaks us apart. With spectacular formal dexterity and a tender awe, the poems track the hidden lives of wildflowers, birds, and other emissaries from an increasingly fragile natural world. Lyrical, irreverent, freighted with a lifetime’s understanding, the poems reach out, with the humility of an apprentice, to the precious others who share our ‘Can you tell / Me / Something of love?’
- GenresPoetry
87 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 25, 2025
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About the author
John Fuller
168 books2 followersThis is the disambiguation profile for otherwise unseparated authors publishing as John Fuller.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 29, 2025
"The ancient green world that we thought we knew/Seems always fresh..."
While not as rich with murderous strife as the corona of sonnets in McEwan's novel, the titular poem in Fuller's collection manages to both be a bravura formal exercise (I rather enjoy how Fuller uses punctuation to vary the meaning of repeated lines) and a meditation on mortality and ageing amidst the beauty of nature. Other unusual literary forms such as the "Winter Cadae", whose number of lines and syllables within them are based on the digits of pi, occur in this collection, which is likewise infused with questions about nature and time. However, while the poems I particularly liked in this collection (such as "'Meditation'", which integrates the frustrated perspective of Claude Monet's wife to an effect that somewhat recalls Anthony Hecht's "The Dover Bitch") were works which struck me as speaking to wider cultural concerns, the tone of many of MARSTON MEADOWS' pieces felt similar, employing similar modes of philosophical soliloquising that made some poems blend together.
While not as rich with murderous strife as the corona of sonnets in McEwan's novel, the titular poem in Fuller's collection manages to both be a bravura formal exercise (I rather enjoy how Fuller uses punctuation to vary the meaning of repeated lines) and a meditation on mortality and ageing amidst the beauty of nature. Other unusual literary forms such as the "Winter Cadae", whose number of lines and syllables within them are based on the digits of pi, occur in this collection, which is likewise infused with questions about nature and time. However, while the poems I particularly liked in this collection (such as "'Meditation'", which integrates the frustrated perspective of Claude Monet's wife to an effect that somewhat recalls Anthony Hecht's "The Dover Bitch") were works which struck me as speaking to wider cultural concerns, the tone of many of MARSTON MEADOWS' pieces felt similar, employing similar modes of philosophical soliloquising that made some poems blend together.
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January 21, 2026ready
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews